The Naked Truth
by Laura Schiller
Summary: What if Dean had told Emily the truth about her novel and certain other things earlier on?


The Naked Truth

By Laura Schiller

Based on L. M. Montgomery's Emily Trilogy

"Are you sure you want to hear the naked truth, Emily?" asked Dean, in his ironic way. "Very few people can endure it without a rag or two."

Emily swallowed hard, still holding out her manuscript. "I do. This book has been ... refused three times. If you tell me it's any good, I'll keep on submitting it. If you don't, I ... I'll put it away." She looked down at it anxiously, like a mother giving away her child.

"I trust you, Dean," she continued, lifting up her purple-grey eyes. "You're my best friend and the cleverest person I know ... I wouldn't ask you this if it didn't mean so much to me."

Dean took the package and went back to his sister's house where he was staying. On the one hand, he felt like he hated whatever was inside it - this story that had held Emily under its spell and away from him for six weeks, leaving him with absentminded remarks and faraway looks, as if she barely realized he was there. But on the other hand ... _I trust you_. Even though he had been making condescending remarks about her writing for years, out of pure, bitter jealousy, she had still had the courage to show him the book.

He read it through in one night by the light of his lamp, tracing his finger over Emily's tiny, elegant handwriting. _A Seller of Dreams_. It was the perfect title and the perfect story for her to write - Emily was a creature of dreams, bright, creative, idealistic. Her eyes shining with the glow of the Alpine Path she saw before her. Everything he was not - and yet, whenever she was near him, some spring of imagination seemed to bubble up in his soul and he felt almost young again.

Dean had always been a little jealous of Emily's writing, as if it could somehow take her away from him. He laughed at himself as he realized how foolish he had been. Emily's stories were a part of her, as much as her cloudy black hair or her pointed ears. They were like little mirrors of her soul, fire-new, as brilliant as the star he had named her. And more than this, he could see his own imprint in the book as well - the influence of books he had lent her, of poems they had read, conversations they had had about everything from cloud shapes to the transmigration of souls.

Nobody, he realized, could love Emily without loving the words of her hand.

When they met in the New Moon gardens the next evening, Emily was wearing her ashes-of-roses gown waiting for him by a white lilac bush, its sweet, heady scent filling the air. She looked like a lilac blossom herself in her white dress, a pink ribbon running through her hair. Her hands were clasped tightly behind her back to hide her nerves, but her flushed cheeks and dark eyes gave her away.

Dean handed her the package, as solemnly as a priest picking up the host.

"It's very good, Star," he said, just to break the suspense. "Of course you still need some restraint - pruning, so to speak - but I can help you there. And your characters _live_ - how do you get your precocious knowledge of human nature, you uncanny thing?" He teased her, with a crooked smile. Emily was too dazed and happy to mind this - at any rate, uncanniness was something the two of them had in common. They walked alone like Kipling's cat and spoke the language of fairyland, to the bafflement of their sensible friends.

"But what I loved best about your story," Dean added, drawing closer, "Was your soul, Star, shining through every line."

Emily, to her own surprise, turned hot and cold. His dreamy gray-green eyes were looking at her with _that_ expression - the one she had seen once before, when she had reminded him of his promise to teach her to 'make love artistically' in her stories. He had tried to kiss her then, but she had pulled away ... why?

For the life of her, she couldn't remember.

"I thought you didn't approve of my writing," she said confusedly. "You always seemed to find it so silly ... "

Dean shook his head, sighed, and put his hands in his pockets. "Emily, I might as well be frank. The only silly creature here in this garden is Jarback Priest himself, for being jealous of a pile of written paper. Yes, my Star, I was jealous. You've never been friends with another writer, have you? Do you know how it felt to sit here with you, knowing it was only your outward form I saw, while your soul was eternities away in some ecstasy of creation? Somewhere not even those who ... who love you the most cannot follow?"

Emily's eyes were wide in a face pale with surprise. Several times she had tried to interrupt. Dean began to pace around the garden as he talked, running his hands over the bark of the old trees, looking anywhere but at her face. She followed hesitantly, waiting to know just what he was trying to say, and suspecting all the while that it was something she had known all along.

Suddenly he whirled around and tok her by the shoulders with his slim, powerful hands. She could have pulled away, but something in his lean, careworn, passionate face kept her rooted to the spot.

"I love you, Emily Byrd Starr. And that's the naked truth."

Without thinking, he did what he had barely dreamed of for so long - he kissed her red, trembling lips.

Emily was flooded with sensations she had never known - a searing heat seemed to flash from her lips right down to the pit of her stomach. She was like a wax doll melting in the fire, and at the same time stronger than she'd ever been.

Dean loved her. How could she not have known? After all these years ...

_"There is something in your company that makes stars starrier and pansies purpler."_

_"Every other beauty is only a background for a beautiful woman."_

_"You rare thing - you vivid thing - you starry thing!"_

_"I think I'll wait for you."_

They broke apart and stared at each other for a moment, dizzy and slightly lost, as if the world had been made new all around them and they had to find their way around in it. Dean felt a sudden onslaught of guilt, as if the kiss were a precious jewel he had stolen.

"Forgive me, Star," he murmured brokenly. "I'm so sorry - I wasn't thinking - "

And this time Emily, mistress of words, could find nothing whatsoever to say as she watched his slight, tweed-coated figure limping away through the dark garden.

*

Well, just to jump into the middle of things - Dean told me he really liked _A Seller of Dreams._ And then he told me he loved me ... and suddenly we were kissing ... and oh, dear diary, I don't know what to do.

I care ever so much for Dean as a friend ... in some ways, better than Ilse and Teddy. They are practical at heart - even Teddy is, for all his painting. Good heavens, Teddy! Here's another dilemna all by itself. I thought he was the only man I could ever love ... but then, didn't I think the same about Aylmer Vincent?

Teddy is a handsome boy, true. And he did save me from Mad Mr. Morrison, and told me ... but that was years ago, and since then he's been so distant with me. Surely, if he truly cared, he would have said something by now - like Dean?

Besides, I hate to admit it even in this journal, but his letters are boring. He's always writing about himself - the drawings he's working on, the magazine editors who _might_ give him commissions, endless parties and gossip. Dean, now, could always make a place come alive in his letters. If he were writing to me from Montreal, I could close my eyes and feel myself there ...

Teddy never pays attention to what I wear or how my hair looks. Dean can make me feel beautiful with one look of those mysterious eyes of his. And when Dean kissed me tonight, I never thought of Teddy at all.

Oh, dear ... looking back at this page, it becomes increasingly clear that E. B. Starr has done it again - imagined herself in love. Am I constitutionally fickle? How am I to know whether the feelings I have are real, or merely the result of the heat of the moment?

Am I in love with Dean now or not?

At any rate, Teddy's coming home on the _Moravian_ soon. Maybe I'll find out then.

*

Emily's second sight was something she never liked to acknowledge, something she buried deep in the back of her mind or brushed off as nothing but coincidence. However, sometimes an event took hold of her - a missing child in danger; the mystery of Ilse's mother; her horrific night in the church and now this, the crossroads of her future - with such relentless force that she _had_ to yield, and from beyond the curtain, she received answers she never could have found otherwise.

It was not a dream. She knew that much. It was clearer, more vivid, than any dream she had ever had. It was as if a screen suddenly opened up on the empty page in her diary, just below the last line. She fixed her eyes upon it, frozen to her seat, unable to look away.

It showed the Disappointed House nestled into its hill, but as she had never seen it before - it was finished, with red sandstone steps in place of the old board ones, and candlelight flickering from the windows. Then it seemed as if her room, her diary and everything else just fell away - and she was standing _in_ the house itself.

There were warm, friendly candles all around and pictures on the walls - Lady Giovanna, Elizabeth Bas, the Mona Lisa. There were two gray cats curled up by the fireplace. The place looked as she had always dreamed it would look - like a home.

On the sofa sat a woman with black hair, purple eyes, and slightly pointed ears. She had a book open in her lap and was reading out loud - Emily could see, but not hear. Two children who looked just like her were snuggled up on either side of her - one looked about five, the other seven. Looking closer, however, she realized that the younger one had green eyes.

Emily started and turned around. There, sitting in an armchair, watching the woman and children, wearing a smile with no trace of bitterness, was Dean Priest.

Behind him stood a bookshelf of which the books in the top row looked all alike, bound in purple cloth like a series. The name on them read _E. B. Priest._

Emily let out a gasp and there she was, cold and shaky, sitting at her desk in New Moon with her diary entry before her. Now_ that_ was an experience she didn't care to repeat.

All the same, her creative mind was already thinking out what to say to Dean.


End file.
